The Detached Image
What you're reading is an attempt to delve deeper into the second aphorism featured in Guy Debord's 'The Society of the Spectacle'. If you missed the first one, you can read it here.
Here's the actual passage:
The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.
For the longest time, it was impossible to think of life as anything other than a continuous and concrete entity, largely because we lacked the means to be able to neatly capture individual moments, mutilate them to our liking and display it to the world under the guise of reality. Oral accounts and written events did make it easy to circulate information, but these were limited by their nature when it came to 'beaming' information into people's minds.
All of that changed when photography was invented. The ability to capture images, both static and dynamic, led to an entirely new way of information dissemination and consumption (this is also around the time when information could be seen as consumable material). Naturally, as this technology started to be commoditized, the information age, as we know it today, came into being.
The Internet as a Stream
Tim Berners-Lee probably had no idea how his invention, which was practically an alien organism, would go on to shape future societies. In fact, the internet as we know it today is a never-ending stream of bits that seemingly have no source or no destination. They might have their roots in reality, either as a picture that someone took; words that were salvaged from the depth of someone's psyche, or code that was conjured in the dusty recesses of the minds of technologists. However, once produced, they become autonomous as they are released into the internet.
Each of these creations or manifestations could be regarded as a 'spectacle', a fundamentally non-living entity that goes on to populate an alternate sphere of existence, i.e. the internet. The Internet, as we conceived it, is a moving thing, one that is beyond the control of any single entity. Since it's constantly moving and keeps absorbing non-living 'spectacles' at a rapid rate, you could regard all of it as one big spectacle that parallels our real, inhabited world.
Tracing it to the Present
Looking back, it's easy to see how the online world as we know it today came to be shaped by a series of inventions and movements.
The early internet established the foundation for a 'pseudo-world', while Netscape gave us an interface to interact with and make up this very world as we meandered through life. Google sought to catalog the entirety of this world, thereby making it easier for people to navigate the information superhighways that were already in place by the late 1990s.
Steve Jobs' incessant desire to create the next best thing put a smartphone in all our pockets. This was an epochal change as it was the final step in the commoditization of the spectacle-creation machine. Anyone and everyone with a smartphone could now birth a spectacle and launch it into the abyss.
Reality as we know it
Given the ease with which these spectacles are so easily engineered and disseminated, it was inevitable that they could burrow their way back to reality through the very path that they used to come into existence: the human mind. As people spend more time online and expose themselves to information streams from multiple sources, the likelihood of their respective realities becoming fractured increases.
Imagine this: you're cooped in your room in a picturesque environment in the Himalayas, but you spend more than 2 hours a day being bombarded with news of all the bad stuff that's happening in the world. If you are the kind of person whose response is to visualize the suffering and establish some kind of empathy towards the subject (this is a perfectly natural response), you're going to be in a fairly bad mood, however scenic and awe-inspiring your surroundings may be.
Some Parting Words
Some of you might remember that scene from Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, where Obi-Wan says to Luke: "Your eyes can deceive you, don't trust them." We now live in an age where your very mind could deceive you if you're not selective with where you spend your time and attention.
Irrespective of how things may seem, it's not as gloomy as I might have portrayed it. All of us can choose to block certain sources of information and there are ample tools that enable us to do so. It is perhaps this very freedom that led Debord to not see the spectacle as a bad thing, but as a necessary phenomenon that would be integral to hastening the relentless pace of capitalism to whatever is destined to succeed it.
--
If any of this sounds relatable, please write to me. Part of the reason I write this is to seek out more people who feel the same way I do about the modern Internet.
If you enjoyed reading this, you might like my cleverly disguised rants on LinkedIn too.